When Benedict Doyle finds himself the owner of his great-grandfather's north London house, he is dismayed. For it was in that house that a sinister darkness of his family's past was revealed. Through that darkness runs the grisly thread of an old legend about a chess set - 32 carved figures believed to possess a dark power, but shut away in the forgotten library of a tumbledown Irish castle for many decades. And when Nell West begins to compile an inventory of Holly Lodge's contents for her antique business, it seems that the chess set's malevolence might be reaching out to the present.